If Canon announces successor to 20D at PMA, when is shelf expectancy?

Has there been a pattern of when Canon announces a new camera, and it
actually hitting the shelves? I cannot decide between the D200 and the
20D. Don't have the coin for the 5D, but do a lot of low light work.
Have always been Nikon, but am willing to consider Canon because of
the great reviews and images I see.

Thanks

 

baker1 writes ...

Last couple of times with the consumer models they've had plenty of
product in the pipeline right away, maybe a few weeks wait if you don't
get an order in as soon as it's announced but not too bad compared to
say the 1D Mark II, which was announced in Feb and not available in
volume until June. Good luck.

Bill

 

It's usually a very short lag time, on the order of weeks, not months.
They don't want to hurt existing sales by announcing too early. With the
5D, there was no existing product that it competed against, so they did
announce it a few months early.

 

For low-light, the D200 is the wrong choice. You'd be a lot happier with the
20D. But.

Get the 350D and spend your money on FF compatible glass (from experience,
the 300D + 50/1.4 is a _great_ combination for low light). If you don't need
to buy any glass, then an expensive body seems a _lot_ cheaper (this one's
from experience too: the only lens I've bought since the 5D has been a used
55-200). It's quite likely that three years from now, there'll be a Canon FF
body that's a lot more affordable.

(Also, the trend in the APS-C area is towards more pixels and worse
low-light performance, so the next generation of things is likely to be
uninteresting.)

Yes, there has been a pattern. Nikon tends to announce _way_ ahead of
availability, and Canon tends to announce immediately prior to availability.
With Canon, there are often rumors that turn out to be quite accurate from
about two weeks before the actual announcement (this one's from experience
too: I lost a bet with Mark2<g>). But the cameras are often on the shelves
within two weeks or so of the announcement.

(Someone who remembers exact dates of things can probably come up with
counterexamples, but both the 1Ds MKII rumors (well, leaked specs) and 5D
rumors turned out to be correct.)

Personally, I think Nikon is more user-friendly. Lots of people don't
realize that a dSLR that was released 18 months ago is long past its sell-by
date, and get burned. The Nikonistas have a better view of what's coming
along.

David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan

 

I'm not the OP, but I'm curious as to why you say that.

The OP didn't say which lenses he already owns. That could be a big
factor in the relative cost of a D200 vs. a 20D.

What do you mean by "user friendly." For the past six months, I
watched the Nikon guys (of which I'm one, for the past 30 or so years
now!) go into tizzy after tizzy about the upcoming D200. Some people
even commented that Nikon should be more forthcoming on future
products. How is Nikon's tightlipped policy user friendly? I would
say the opposite.

How much technology change do you expect in 18 months? We're not
talking Moore's Law here.

Appropriately priced,there is nothing wrong with an "older model"
DSLR. And that doesn't make the older model obsolete or useless.
Unless you're the "gotta have the latest model" kind of guy.

Why, because of the incessant rumors and the relatively long delays
between announcement and store availability?

To switch the topic only slightly, do YOU have any inside poop on the
rumored Nikon full-frame sensor DSLR?

domu arrigato gozai masu

Father Kodak (bowing deeply)

 

Everything I've seen indicates that the D200 is worse than the 20D in terms
of high-ISO noise.

Since Canon doesn't tell people when it's going to release a new model, once
a model is 12 months old, you never know if it's going to be 2 weeks, 2
months, or a year until the next model. So users buying the 20D now have the
problem that they just don't know.

In this particular case, though, since the OP wants low-light performance,
my opinion/best guess is that he'd be fine with the 20D, since the follow on
is likely to be more pixels and worse low-light performance to match the
D200.

Improved AF, much nicer LCD, a few more pixels, and a surprise or two
(better weather sealing?). Actually, Moore's Law is of some concern here
because newer cameras tend to have larger buffers for burst shooting.

I think that improvements will be slowing down, though.

Agreed. The _only_ thing that I was commenting on was the problem of
spending serious money and then finding out 3 weeks later that there'll be a
somewhat better one out long before one has even begun to figure out the
current camera.

Because the announcement precedes release by such a long time, you get to
choose between purchasing now and not getting the improvements or putting up
with not having a camera for a bit and getting the improvements.

Nope. I've not even heard those rumors<g>.

David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan

 

I agree with most of your points, just not with the bit about
Moore's Law. Are you talking about memory cell density, speed or
power consumption? Maybe if you wanted to shoehorn a 10 GB buffer
in an ultra-compact camera, but even the largest buffers in DSLRs
are far smaller than that, the DSLRs have much more space to hold
them, and the buffer memory doesn't have to match the super high
speed of cache RAM used in CPU chips, so it'll run cooler too.